Infinity Renaissance 90 questions

Hi Okeeteekid, thanks for sharing your views and experience with your Renaissance 90's. It's great to hear you like the black ash finish as well! I have also heard many accounts of the Ren 90's not sounding boxy at all & having excellent coherancy. That is testimony too to the successful collaberation between Charlie Watkins & Infinity in developing the 10" Watkins woofer for the Rens.

I currently own Infinity Reference 60's which had twin 8" IMG bass drivers & an IMG midrange, so I can certainly appreciate the timbral accuracy and warmth the IMG drivers seem to produce; wonderful with accoustic and jazz (eg: Diana Krall). I agree with your statement about Infinity (aka Harmon)'s "hifi" offerings such as the Preludes!...Arnie Nudel must have smashed a hole in his apartment wall after he saw 25 years of his hard work turned into a flea market!

Ah you saw the ad for my black Rens! Yeah, I think that member is known to AG members here. Larry is a Doctor with his own practice & an absolutely terrific guy. He is also an Infinity nut as you would have read & owns IRS-V's, two pair of IRS-Betas, 3 pairs (now 1) of Ren 90's & a pair of Ren 80's. The pair I bought were late-manufacture & used less than a dozen times in 11 years, so are virtually mint which is unheard of for these speakers, so i'm wrapped :)

I'm anxious to see how my Classe Cap-2100 handles the demanding load of the Rens. Obviously the Cap doesn't have anything like as many watts per channel as your big Pass block, however surprisingly it has a lot more current, so on balance it should do a good job, but of course being an Audiophile - I plan on upgrading to it's bigger brother (CA-2200) & a tube preamp next year which, apart from a future upgrade of my current transport (JVC XL-Z1050), will be the final iteration of my high end system :) And yes, I am going to trust Nudel & Christie and leave the Ren's x-over well alone..

Welcome to the club! I have a pair in blonde oak. Look and sound great! I started with a 150 w/ch 8 ohms/ 300 w/ch 4 ohms integrated A308 from Musical Fidelity. It did a decent job in running the speakers but I could tell their was something missing. Then biamped using the integrated for the bass and a Rogue 80 watt per channel tube amp for the highs and mids. Good sound but light on the bass. I then moved to a Musical fidelity A308 pre-amp and A308 amplifier at 250 w/ch 8 ohms/ 450 w/ch 4 ohms. Now we're getting somewhere. The speakers bloomed ! So I figure they love power! I then got another A308 amp and biamped the system. Now at 900w/ch into 4 ohms !! WOW what a difference. !!! The speakers sang! Soundstage was huge and open, bass was tremndous ! Of course, the supporting equipment must be up to par as well as the cables. I now run the speakers between two systems. The one above and a vintage Luxman CL-35 II tube preamp and the monster Luxman M-6000 rated at minimum 300 w/ch into 8 ohms. I couldnt even guess what the 4 ohm rating would be. The mids are just beautiful ! The more high quality power you feed them, the better !! Good luck !

Hi Olp88, thanks for sharing your experiences with your Renaissance 90's. I always find it interesting to hear the excitement and genuine enthusiasm owners have for these gems. You're certainly feeding your Rens plenty of juice! I agree, I believe they need lots of good, high quality power. I am kind of starting out in a similar vain to yourself with a high current Classe Integrated. I am passionate about the ultimate fidelity of my system, hence buying new Classe gear; very clean, smooth tube-like warmth & very high current. I did weight up the bi-amping option, but that adds considerable cost & I would have had to have sourced earlier model gear on A'gon to achieve that within my budget. I am getting all the weak links in my system sorted out before I upgrade amps & am planning to upgrade 6 power cords to reference pc's & a new high end filter - your system is only as good as the juice you feed it! The more vs fidelity battle on amps was easily resolved for me (pardon the pun) Fidelity one! So I plan to upgrade next year to a big Classe CA2200 & Audio Research tube pre-amp :) I thought that will sound stunning & always leaves me room to bi-amp the system with an AR tube PA one rainy day :)

I have actually built external crossovers for my Renaissance 90 EMIT tweeters using Mundorf SIO caps and copper foil inductors. There was quite a jump in efficiency and I had to slightly alter the tweeter amp gain to compensate. For single amp drive you could pad the EMIT with a slightly bigger resistor (0.5 > 1 ohm).
The main benefit of the upgraded crossover was improved dynamics. I also modelled the crossover frequency response in LT spice and found that there was a 2.5dB peak at 2.3KHz. I was not surprised to see this because I had always thought that they were a bit too forward in the presence range. I have heard that there were changes made to the crossovers during the Ren 90's lifecycle that corrected this but I'm not 100% sure. However, the Ren 80's are using diferent values and do have a flatter crossover response when modelled.
I subsequently modded my crossover values to achieve a response +/- 1dB from 1Khz to 20KHz. To do this correctly you need to change a 33uF cap in the EMIM crossover to 30uF and also insert a 0.22R in series with the cap. When I did this mod I also noticed that the 10 year old 33uF electrolytics had expanded slightly at each end. I replaced them both with Blackgate 30uF 50V NPO electros and there was an immediate audible improvement. The MF seemed more pure and imaging was much more accurate. The other fine tune necessary is to add a 1uf in parallel with the 5.6uF pp film cap in the EMIT crossover. Both of these changes combined will result in a much smoother sounding upper mid range and a far more seamless transition from EMIM to EMIT.

More recently I have disconnected the EMITS and am using Raal pure ribbon tweeters which sit on top of the Ren 90's. This also necessitated some fine tuning of the crossovers but the result is really stunning. I have also designed a DC bias system for the tweeter crossover so that both SIO caps are voltage biased at 33V DC.
The main improvement from the Raal tweeters stems from the much wider HF dispersion and far more extended treble, but they also seem cleaner, less grainy and sweeter sounding, but then again they are also very expensive. IMO the EMITs used in the Rens are a very good tweeter and with the 2 component changes mentioned above the response will definitely be flatter.

Hi Timpani, I was really interested to read that earlier run Renaissance 90's had a 2.5db peak at 2.3Khz. Interesting! That does support Infinity's motivation to introduce later revs of the crossover. That also put a smile on my face as the pair I bought were late-manufacture/late sale examples which would have had the later x-over, thus not requiring mods for (hopefully) a long time to come. It would take a very skilled audio engineer to do in a couple of weeks what Infinity spend hundreds of hours to perfect, so on reflection, i'm happy to laave it well alone.